Action On Education

Oxfam’s campaign ‘Education Now: Break the Cycle of Poverty’ has five core proposals:
1 A Global Action Plan to ensure that the target of universal primary education by the year 2015 is achieved.2 Earlier and deeper debt reduction, with savings invested in basic education.3 More and better aid for basic education, from both the World Bank and Northern governments.4 Integrating human development into IMF and World Bank programmes so as to protect access to basic education.5 Action by governments in developing countries, including removing school fees, converting military expenditure and improving teaching quality.

Global Week of Action

A worldwide alliance of teachers’ unions and non-governmental organizations is mounting a Global Week of Action on the right to high-quality public education. Scheduled for the run-up to the April 2000 World Education Conference in Dakar, Senegal, the aim is to put more pressure on aid donors and governments. Among the parallel events will be e-mail petitions, school-to-school solidarity links and a relay race to ‘pass the torch of learning’ around the world. For more details contact one of the organizations on the steering committee: ActionAid, Education International or Oxfam International.

Elimu

Elimu is a grassroots campaign co-ordinated by ActionAid which strengthens the capacity of Southern organizations (from national bodies to local parent-teacher associations) to speak out on education issues. But to mark the last Literacy Day of the twentieth century – and address the fact that nearly one billion adults will enter the new millennium unable to read and write – Elimu is asking people in Northern countries to send postcards to their local parliamentary representative. Elimu’s suggested text is:

‘I have recently become aware of the global crisis in education. Around 125 million children across the developing world receive no primary schooling at all. One in four adults are illiterate. I am concerned that the poor are being denied their right to a good education. I support Elimu’s “Education is Life” campaign. Please urge the Government to increase aid to basic education in the poorest countries, and to end the practice of “tied” aid (requiring that aid be spent on goods and services in the donor country).’

Australian Education Union is the national umbrella body for all state teachers’ unions and is the best resource for campaigning. There are strong state offices but the federal office can be contacted at:
Post: PO Box 1158, South Melbourne, Victoria 3205.
Tel: +61 3 9254 1800. Fax: +61 3 9254 1805.
E-mail: aeu@edunions.labor.net.au
Web: www.edunions.labor.net.au

Yunggorendi First Nations Centre of Higher Education & Research supports the access of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to tertiary study and establishes an environment where their history and culture can be respected.
Tel: +61 8 8201 3033.
Web: admin www.flinders.edu.au/studentinfo/yunggorendi.html

BRITAINActionAid and its European sibling agencies facilitate the Elimu campaign in the North. Its literacy programme, Reflect, has broken new ground all over the world. It is working with British and Irish anti-poverty groups to organize Elimu consultations highlighting the growing education inequalities in the North.
Post: Hamlyn House, Macdonald Road, Archway, London N19 5PG.
Tel: +44 207 561 7561. Fax: +44 207 272 0899.
E-mail: mail@actionaid.org.uk
Web: www.actionaid.org

Human Scale Education is an organization dedicated to encouraging new initiatives and experiments, including smaller schools or learning projects and home learning. It is organizing an Alternatives in Education Fair in London on 25 September.
Post: 96 Carlingcott, Nr Bath BA2 8AW.
Tel/Fax: +44 1972 510709.
E-mail: hse@clara.net
Web: www.hse.home.clara.net

UNITED STATESOxfam America is the best local contact point for the Oxfam International and Elimu campaigns.
Post: 26 West St, Boston, MA 02111-1206.
Tel: +1 617 482 1211. Fax: +1 617 728 2595.
E-mail: oxfamusa@igc.apc.org

CACE (Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education)
An invaluable website which tracks the incursions of the education-for-profit companies. www.uwm.edu/Dept/CACE/

WORTH READING

The US quarterly Rethinking Schools is a treasure trove of thoughtful writing by progressive teachers who have to deal with the right-wing education offensive from day to day. One-year subscriptions within the US are $12.50.
Post: 1001 E Keefe Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53212.
Tel: +44 1 414 964 9646. Fax: +1 414 964 7220.
E-mail: rsbusiness@aol.com
Web: www.rethinking schools.org

Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities (Harper Perennial) from 1991 remains a blistering indictment of the injustice built into US schooling, while Sandro Contenta’s Rituals of Failure (Between the Lines 1993) paints a similarly bleak picture of Canadian schools.

Teacher and writer Chris Searle has unfailingly promoted a radical, internationalist education agenda in Britain for three decades. None but our words (Open University Press, Buckingham and Philadelphia 1999) looks back on key incidents and insights in a life inspired by the great Brazilian literacy activist Paulo Freire, author of the classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, who died last year.

The work of Howard Gardner (notably Multiple Intelligences, Basic Books, New York, 1993) remains a fascinating corrective to those politicians who believe children will benefit from a return to Victorian teaching values. What we should all be doing is looking forward rather than back and Edmund O’Sullivan’s book Transformative Vision for Education in the New Century (Zed 1999) does just that, putting ecology, justice and the human spirit in the forefront.

New Internationalist reports on issues of world poverty and inequality. We focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide in the fight for global justice. More about our work